Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

Wang had come back to them a different man, it seemed. Gibs had always been fond of the guy, going back to the first day they’d met in Colorado Springs, but now there was no small amount of admiration mixed in with that regard. The kid sat there in possession of only a single leg, but if he were to be inserted into an ass-kicking contest, Gibs would have been certain to put money on him over any other joker. Pride didn’t even enter into the equation; the Marine assigned himself no credit whatsoever for the projection of quiet resilience and resolve that wafted off Wang. However it was he’d ended up—whatever it was he’d ended up becoming—he’d gotten there on his own. Gibs was certain of this.

Perhaps sensing Gibs’s attention, Wang glanced at him. He shot a single nod and said, “What?”

Gibs shook his head and smiled like a goon. “It’s… heh, it’s just really fucking good to see you, Wang.”

“I second that,” said Jake. “We thought we’d be seeing you again a lot sooner than this.”

Wang nodded. “Yeah, I… took a bit of a detour.”

“You’ve settled in okay?” asked Jake.

Wang gave a more-or-less nod. “I didn’t have much with me when I was picked up; just some bloody clothes, my rig, and the rifle—I guess that was you, Gibs?”

“Yeah. Didn’t know how it would go but I expected you to pull through. I wanted you to have your weapon when you did.”

Wang offered a relaxed salute in the other’s direction.

“Things have kind of moved around a bit since you’ve been gone,” said Amanda. “We have those new campers out there, as you’ve seen. People have fallen into their own homes now, but I’m sure we can get you set up in your old place. Oscar was even planning on more container homes once we get closer to summer and all the mud dries up—”

“You could stay with me,” offered Gibs. “Plenty of room over at Casa de Redneck.”

“Thanks, but I’m set for now.”

Gibs leaned forward on the couch. “You mean Monica’s place?” He was smiling broadly.

Wang dipped his head and said, “Err… yeah…” He looked down as he took a sip from his coffee cup, failing miserably in his attempt to hide the fact that he was blushing. Amanda glanced at Jake, her eyes wide and lips pursed in a restrained smile. Jake squinted one eye at her in a subdued wink.

Wang said, “You guys didn’t bring me in here to gossip. You want a brain-dump on Otter.”

The levity bled out of the room like air leaking from a child’s balloon. Jake nodded and said, “Let me bring you up to speed—”

“Oh, I have a decent idea what happened. He came in here intending to absorb you all, or maybe move into the valley. Maybe he even said he’d bring you out and take you along with him to the next place. And, of course, I know what you said back to him…”

Jake raised his eyebrows. “And what was that?”

Wang shrugged, “Well, you told him ‘no,’ of course.”

Tilting his head to one side, Jake said, “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.”

“How complicated?” asked Gibs.

“It’s probably best that I give you all a complete recounting,” said Jake, and proceeded to replay the entire conversation he had with Warren, getting it nearly word-perfect while managing to leave out all traces of emphasis or emotion. He relayed it all matter-of-factly, ending at his dismissal of the man, and then sat quietly in his chair awaiting their response.

Agitated, Gibs scooted forward to the edge of his seat. He extended a knife hand in Jake’s direction, opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and looked down at the floor for a few seconds to collect himself. His extended hand bounced up and down slightly, braced as it was against his knee at the elbow. Finally, he looked up again and asked, “Jake, did your mother drink a lot of Drano during her pregnancy?”

“I suppose anything’s possible, but I suspect not.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Gibs said and leaned back on the couch. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”

Amanda, who had been sitting uncomfortably in her chair, said, “Are you crazy?”

“I’m sorry?” asked Jake.

“That man… that man has a giant line of armored vehicles, Jake! He has a whole pile of those Humvees with machine guns! I saw it all; he can roll us right under his tires, for Christ’s sake!”

“Calm down,” Wang said.

“Calm down!”

“Sure, calm down. I’ve spent some time with Otter, remember. I’m telling you now: Jake read him right. He’s not a lunatic. He’s just trying to do what he thinks is right. You think he’s going to roll up in here with his guns out? Why? Because Jake told him to take a hike? Otter’s not a warlord, you guys; he’s a Navy Seal.”

“What Navy?” Amanda asked.

Wang shrugged. “He doesn’t see it that way. We’re U.S. citizens, right? His job is to protect us. I guarantee you he’s struggling with that right now. He won’t leave knowing that we’re up here, but he won’t attack either. He’s putting everything he has into grilling Jeffries and his men right now, that’s what he’s doing. All of his concentration will be devoted to figuring out if Jake was bluffing.”

“Were you bluffing, Jake?” Gibs asked.

Jake looked at him a moment, unblinking eyes glassed over slightly, then said, “And so here I am as well, Wang, attempting to do the same thing. I need to get a sense about him and his people as quickly as I can so we can get a working plan together before he decides to test me. You’re absolutely right, I know that at least. Warren won’t let a thing go if he’s decided it’s imperative. At some point, he’ll decide to rush in here and take us under control for our own good. I don’t know when that will happen, but… yes. He’ll eventually determine it’s better for him to be a jailer than it is to abandon us to our fate.”

“So… we’re looking for some way to get him to choose to leave us alone?” Amanda scoffed. “Has anyone tried ‘pretty please?’”

Jake glanced up at the ceiling and laughed; a single exhaled “ha.” He looked at Wang and said, “What can you tell us about them?”

Wang sighed and scratched the back of his buzzed head. He shifted a bit in the chair, leaning further onto his hip to try and distribute some of his weight to his right elbow, still posted on the armrest. Glancing at each of them in turn, he said, “I guess I’d say that Otto Warren is the most focused person I’ve ever met in my life. It’s insane; like he’s not even human, just some machine. I want you guys to picture, like, a child’s remote-controlled toy, okay? Imagine that you jam the forward button down on the remote, so the toy just goes forward no matter what. You press the right-left stick around to help it move around stuff in the room; tables and chair legs, right? Now imagine that you set the remote down to go answer the phone or something and the toy runs into the wall. It just keeps plowing into that wall, doesn’t it?

“Well, that’s basically Warren. I gather that the last order he had from, uh, whatever officer it was he took orders from—”

“Captain,” supplied Gibs.

“Fine, a captain then. Either way, that last order was basically to protect whatever plague refugees he had left. Keep them safe and healthy… find some way to set them up in a permanent situation. And, as far as he’s concerned, he hasn’t achieved that yet.

“But the other thing I want to make clear is that he’s not actually a dumb robot. That’s just an analogy. The actual man, Warren, is the exact opposite of a dummy. I can’t even describe it…”

“He’s right,” Gibs nodded. “The general public’s image of a Navy Seal was always a bunch of oiled buff guys running up a beach on Coronado, carrying Zodiacs over their heads and doing about a million push-ups, but few people realize the kind of mental requirements they had. These guys were incredibly sharp. They got all the really odd, non-standard jobs, so you needed people who could learn anything and everything at accelerated rates, often times within the space of a few hours before they were deployed to go whoop some ass. And I mean anything. Suppose some terrorists took over a nuke power plant and a team had to go in and dig ’em out? Well, they’d have to become experts in nuclear power plants on the way over in order to be sure that nothing unfortunate happened once they got there, such as a bigass meltdown. These guys were some of the best, and they only got more impressive the higher up the command chain they got.”